1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to inkjet printers and, more particularly, to servicing mechanisms for inkjet printers.
2. Related Art
The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Typical, small inkjet printers for home and/or office use include a print head provided with liquid ink from an ink supply. During operation, the print head ejects ink drops through a plurality of orifices or nozzles toward a print medium (e.g. a sheet of paper) thereby providing a printing pattern on the print medium. The orifices are generally configured in one or more arrays so that properly sequenced ejection of ink from the orifices causes characters or other images to be printed on the print medium as the print head and the print medium are moved relative to each other.
In addition to the small inkjet printers that include selectively positioned print heads as described above, another style of printers known as page-wide printers are also in demand. Page-wide printers are constructed with a page-wide print head that includes page wide print arrays allowing for the entire width of the desired image to be printed without requiring movement of the page-wide print head. In other words, the page-wide print arrays span the entire width of the target print medium. Page-wide print heads thus require substantially more nozzles than commonly used inkjet printers.
An issue among inkjet printers involves the improper operation of one or more nozzles of the print head due to particulate accumulation and/or residual ink. Often various forms of debris can accumulate around the nozzles thereby causing interference (e.g., altered ink drop formation) with the normal nozzle operation. Additionally, the liquid ink can dry-out within and in the vicinity of the nozzles, thereby potentially causing the nozzles to be “plugged” (i.e., normal ink flow to be blocked). In the case of page-wide printers that may include thousands of nozzles, performance and efficiency can be substantially decreased due to improper nozzle operation.